Category: General

We dipped into a couple of events in Limerick for the now-branded “Limerick Literary Festival in honour of Kate O’Brien“. Presumably KOBstock was ruled out early in the marketing meetings. Everything’s a festival now, so can’t complain too much I suppose.

Anyway, Limerick’s always good for a visit, so we did.

The first talk we went to was non-Kate O’Brien-related:

Christine Dwyer Hickey, Edward Hopper: Turning an icon into a novel. Christine will discuss the writing of her latest novel, The Narrow Land. Set in Cape Cod in the summer of 1950, it tells the story of two young boys who befriend a couple living nearby in an isolated house overlooking the sea – the artists Edward and Jo Hopper.

http://limerickliteraryfestival.com/Programme/

This was excellent – the author was a brilliant presenter and really brought her adventure writing the book to life.

The following day, we attended one of the hardcore Kate O’Brien talks.

Disclaimer: I’ve never read anything by Kate O’Brien. I feel that if I’d devoured every book she ever wrote, I still wouldn’t have had the level of interest that many of the audience clearly exhibited – they were geeks of the highest order, and why not?

The dreaded part of the Q&A session when someone (normally a man, often English) starts with “this is more an observation than a question, but…” and proceeds to ramble on about something for 10 minutes happened, but wasn’t too painful.

After the debut novel award presentation that followed (congrats to Nicole Slattery, who was well-feted at last year’s Festival of Writing and Ideas, so not a great shock to me), we went for a roast beef lunch at the Alex Findlater nearby, which more than made up for the dryness of the preceding hour for me.

A very weak attempt to hide the fact that I’m posting some more photos of Ballybunion. Sorry not sorry.

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Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control, we weren’t able to spend the weekend of the Doolin Folk Festival in the trailer tent. This meant that we missed out on being cold, wet and uncomfortable during the night, but we were very brave about it all.

Instead, we stayed in a guesthouse a few kilometres away:

It was handy enough, especially as we’d booked it very last-minute.

We got to Doolin on Friday evening and hit the ground running by going to see Noel Hill, the concertina player.

He was pretty entertaining, especially when he got out his secret weapon: a really small concertina.

“But what would a tiny concertina look like?”

I’m glad you asked:

Clannad played later on. Hard to top the micro instrument mastery, but they somehow managed it.

We set off from Harrogate at 4pm, heading for Liverpool and the overnight ferry to Dublin. I’d spent a fair few hours re-working our trailer tent to make it more suitable for carrying cargo (and easier to pitch), so was a bit anxious to see how that held up to the journey. I’m not known (in a positive sense) for my woodworking skills, but amazingly things held together ok.

Here’s a shot of the outcome of my da Vinci-level design skills:

The journey was mostly fine apart from when Google Maps decided that the optimal route to the docks was via a housing estate with a possibly unrivalled collection of speed bumps.  The trailer remained attached throughout.

And here’s it installed on the ferry:

This was my second year of attending the weekend, and I had learnt a couple of important lessons from the initial visit.

Firstly, if a workshop looks like it won’t be useful / engaging enough for 3 hours, don’t stay until the end.

Secondly, drinking heavily on Saturday night makes for quite a dangerous cliff-top walk on Sunday morning.

I only had to make use of the latter learning this time – the workshops both had enough in them to keep my interest. Yes, I only made it to two this year, as the others either didn’t massively interest me or were for things that weren’t particularly relevant at the moment.

We arrived on Friday in time to attend the workshop “Finding Your Voice With The Short Story” by Anthony Glavin (not the one who died in 2006, but a cheery chap originally from Boston but with enough of an Irish accent to make me think he’d relocated some time ago). He’s written a couple of short story collections and books, so presumably knew what he was talking about. I ended up writing a few brief starts of stories based on his prompts.

After that, there was the drinks reception. Friday was fine for drinking, as I hadn’t booked any workshop on Saturday morning. The booze flowed freely for quite some time, then there were prizes and speeches and readings.

Little John Nee performed later on, which was a real treat and unlike anything I’ve seen before – a one-man show of story-telling through speech, song and various quirky instruments. I don’t know how much touring he does, but if you get the chance, he’s a gem.

Finally, a few quiet drinks in Fitz’s bar and some gentle dancing before bedtime.

Saturday morning I went for a stroll around Doolin to see the sights and clear my head. The air was fresh and dry when I set off, seducing me into leaving my coat back at the room. This proved to be a tad over-optimistic. It did give me the chance to get some photos of a rainbow, however, so not a complete wash-out.

I bravely headed back to the hotel and had some coffee and a scone, happily meeting someone I knew and chatting for some time about books and stuff. All very civilised. After lunch, it was time for my next workshop: “White Ink” by Danielle McLaughlin.

It’s worth noting at this point that Irish writing is not renowned for being cheerful. In fact, the country’s writers are probably responsible for more miserable and depressing output than an Irish sausage factory.

Danielle’s workshop was named after the maxim that happiness always writes white. I remember reading a summary of what’s coming up in 2019 in The Guardian recently, and it had a very entertaining section on the forthcoming Adele album that was written when she was happy. We’ll see how that turns out, Adull.

Anyway, back to the workshop. Danielle made a lot of interesting points regarding the potential to infuse writing with happiness and hope, but I doubt anyone leaving the room would have changed their original course away from misery fiction. We did some good descriptive work exercises, but my story ended in yet another senseless murder, so think I failed to “get with the programme”.

It’s easy to infuse a story with hope if you’re planning to use that hope to upset the reader a bit later on when it gets whipped away by a passing psychopath, but less promising if you’re thinking readers won’t be feeling robbed if they get to the end of the story and the body count is a big fat zero. Maybe that says more about me than them, but look at the TV schedules and show me “cheery drama” with high viewing figures.

You’ll be staggered to learn that drinking followed the workshop… the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party is an opportunity to drink gin and eat doughnuts and small savoury items while listening to people reading from their books, etc. It was as you might imagine: excellent. More free-form drinking followed.

Sunday morning 9am saw the highlight of the weekend for me: the Cliff Ginko with Kathy D’Arcy. The format was much the same as last year – show up, meditate, walk, meditate, write, walk, try not to fall off the cliff. The route was shorter than last year, and felt substantially safer.

In addition to the cliffs, the walk encompasses views up to the strikingly-cylindrical Doonagore Castle. Read the linked Wikipedia article for a heart-warming tale of mass execution. The farmer responsible for having organised the creation of the walking trail, Pat Sweeney, was particularly pleased with this view over the stone bridge up to the castle, and justifiably so, I think:

We got back in time for Mass, which was somewhat non-traditional, being led by high priestess Susan Tomaselli with able assistance from altar girl June Caldwell. There were readings by several authors, and a good time was had by all (assuming nobody there was actually staunchly religious).

Mini sausage butties, tarts, croissants, etc. were to be had in the bar area for brunch, and they were awesome. If the Catholic church ever worried about dwindling numbers and felt determined that letting moral relativism through the doors was a bridge too far, they could do a lot worse than look to fancy catering as a solution.

Job done – an excellent weekend. Some aspects were definitely better than the previous year’s event… having a new big barn to hold events made it hold together a lot better, and the catering stepped up several notches from an already solid effort.

The latest efforts from the US to move us smoothly into WW3 have disturbing knock-on effects around the world, some very close to the bog in fact. The dystopian world in which we now live, where the massively inept Boris Johnson provides the British interface to the world, has seen escalations in tension between the US and Russia to the point where Trump’s administration announced very tough sanctions against some of Russia’s finest oligarchs last week.

One of those great self-made men, tirelessly working for the common good, is Oleg Deripaska. His company took ownership of a massive alumina processing plant, which lies on the Shannon river between the house on the bog and Limerick over 10 years ago. It employs loads of people around the area (I think nearly 500), and we know quite a few of them.

The plant takes in bauxite, processes it into alumina using lovely chemicals that definitely do no harm to anyone (I think caustic soda is an excellent exfoliating cream), then ships it out to be made into aluminium. Which customers in the US might not be able to buy anymore (and the US suppliers of caustic soda may be blocked too). I mean, they might not be able to pronounce the word ‘aluminium’ correctly, but still… [side note: aluminum was one of the names Sir Humphry Davy tried out before the One True version was settled on by everyone except the US and Canada].

Anyway – eek.

The featured image definitely isn’t a shot of someone having poured petrol over dead knotweed, then throwing a lit match at it. All of those Mythbusters-type things claiming that throwing a lit cigarette at some petrol wouldn’t do what it does in films… feel free to come to my ‘lab’ (insurance and fee permitting).